John Hollinger ranks the Detroit Pistons behind Thunder in best NBA franchises

John Hollinger is known for creating mathematical formulas to try and rank teams and players. Sometimes those formulas make some sense, other times they seem off and don't make much sense.

In this case, I think Hollinger has went far beyond publishing a credible ranking for NBA teams and into the ridiculous. Hollinger ranks the Utah Jazz, Portland Trail Blazers, Indiana Pacers and OKC Thunder ahead of the Detroit Pistons.

June 11, ESPN: My team is better than your team. That simple argument is at the heart of sports. Fans can debate about players or strategies or countless other issues, but what tends to get hearts pounding the most is when fans start trading boasts about which side is better.

Almost immediately, the barbs will begin about the various sides' accomplishments. Celtics fans will throw their 17 championships in the face of anyone who dares challenge them; Lakers fans might answer with their 30 conference titles, while Spurs supporters will point out that their past decade is arguably the best of anyone's. And so on down the line, until we get to a few scattered Grizzlies supporters waiting meekly in the corner for a Clippers fan to walk by.

And that's where we step in. With six decades of history to fall back on, we can take a look in the rearview mirror and stack up each team's accomplishments from 1 to 30. Obviously we can't account for every single credit and debit over such a huge time frame, but it turns out that once we install some basic accounting principles, the list pretty much falls into place.

Hollinger then goes through the criteria for his formula and explains his reasoning. He gives 1 point for each regular season win, 2 points for each playoff victory, 4 points for each playoff series win, 30 points for each NBA Title and 2 points for each All-Star a team produces. He also includes a couple other categories, Relocation and Intangibles.

Relocation is a 100-point penalty. Changing cities is the ultimate failure for a sports franchise, leaving the fans in the former city out in the cold and forcing the team to build a new history with unfamiliar faces in a different locale. In a couple of instances I penalized teams 50 points for "half-relocations" -- Baltimore to Washington for the Bullets, Long Island to New Jersey for the Nets -- when they stayed in the same general region but likely had to cultivate a new base of ticket holders.

Intangibles matter too, and I created a separate category for special circumstances. For instance, the Blazers of the early part of this decade were perfectly respectable in terms of wins and losses, but few were eager to admit rooting for that team because of all the scoundrels littering the roster. This is the one part that's completely subjective, but for several teams I subtracted or added 50 to 150 points based on playing styles, player behavior, superstars and other major factors.

So I took the total numbers for a few of the teams using Hollinger's rankings and here is what I got. The Pistons(13th) had a total of 3,150 points, the Phoenix Suns(ranked #5) had 2,372 points and the Oklahoma City Thunder(12th) had 2,202 points. What Hollinger did was take the number of seasons each franchise played and divide the total points by that number. So teams who have been in the league a relatively low amount of years but have had some success will have a better number than teams who have been in the league for a long time and have had gone through years of bad times.